The Responsive Public: How EU Decisions Shape Public Opinion on Salient Policies

• In Event: International Actors and Public Attitudes Toward Cooperation

Abstract

Do the European Union’s decisions affect public opinion about electorally salient policies? Recent studies show that the European Union’s policy choices have become politized in member states (Hagemann et al., 2017). Eager to avoid being punished by voters for taking unpopular decisions, European governments aim to signal responsiveness to domestic electorates during negotiations in Brussels (Schneider, 2018). In contrast to the existing literature, this paper argues that decisions in the European Union do not merely respond to public opinion in member states. Instead, they also shape how European publics think about electorally salient policies. Specifically, the European Union’s adoption of a policy increases popular support for that policy, but only among those Europeans who trust the Union. Policy decisions by a united Union have a bigger impact on public opinion than those taken by a divided one.
Public opinion scholarship indicates that most Europeans tend to be rationally ignorant about European politics and form their political attitudes based on cues from trusted elites (De Vries and Edwards, 2009; Gabel and Scheve, 2007). Empirical tests of elite cue theory focus on the cues Europeans citizens receive from political parties, and they conclude that party elites have a bigger impact on partisans’ attitudes when they are united rather than divided, because divided elites muddle the group’s message (Ray, 2003; Franklin et al., 1994). We know much less about the effect of cues conveyed by another set of elites whose decisions on electorally salient issues are widely reported in the European mass media: the Council of the European Union, the union’s main legislative body. I argue that the adoption of an electorally salient policy by this body will lead to an increase in support for that policy by members of the European public. Elite cue theory leads me to expect that this effect only materializes among those members of the public that view the Council of the European Union as a trustworthy body. Moreover, the adoption of a policy by a unanimous Council conveys a qualitatively different cue to members of the public than the Council’s endorsement of the same policy despite vocal dissent, and the latter should lead to a smaller rally in support of the policy than the former.
To test this argument, I fielded experiments embedded in two original surveys that were administered to large nationally representative samples of German and Austrian citizens in 2020. The experiments described scenarios involving two highly salient policies: the EU’s Coronavirus recovery fund and refugee redistribution between member states. Respondents were randomly assigned to different cues about the adoption or non-adoption of decisions by a united or divided Council and asked to express their own opinion about these policies. The survey experiments indicate that publics respond to signals conveyed from Brussels. The cues about the Council’s adoption of the Coronavirus recovery fund and refugee redistribution increased German and Austrian respondents’ support of these policies by five to nine percentage points. As expected, this average effect was driven by the subset of respondents who view the Council of the EU as trustworthy. Unanimous decisions triggered a larger rally in public support than policy choices over which the Council members were divided.
This study makes several contributions to the literature on European integration and public opinion. First, it presents a novel argument that European publics take cues from the European Union when they form opinions about salient policies. Thus, it sheds new light on elite cue theory and on the signals conveyed by elites other than political parties. Second, the additional signaling effect of unanimity in the Council of the EU gives European governments an incentive to pursue consensus on salient policies in order to rally their publics in support of their decisions. In turn, this added value may help us understand why unanimous Council decisions are ubiquitous even in issue areas where the formal rules prescribe qualified majority voting. Third, by fielding experiments the study seeks to mitigate the risk of endogeneity (e.g., between unanimity in the Council of the EU and European public opinion) that tends to afflict studies that investigate public opinion with observational data. Fielding multiple experiments in more than one country ensures that the findings are not driven by the specific formulation of the vignette or the idiosyncrasies of a single national context.

Author

• Christoph Mikulaschek, Harvard University